An encyclopedia of the Cirsovan empire, thoughts on Gaming, Music and more.

I’ve noticed that with minor rants on twitter, I tend to have less blog fodder, because the thinks come out as shallow thinks in a couple tweets, which get it out of my system, rather than deep thinks which end up as blog posts.

Anyway, Issue 5 is out the door, and barring any of customer support issues I have to deal with, we’ve put it behind us and ready to move onto what needs to be done for issue 6. I’ll have a physical proof today or tomorrow to do my markups on, so we’re well on track, which brings us to the next thing.

Please do not send us anything before June 1st! We might lose it, and you don’t want that to happen. If you’ve got something you’ve been holding onto, polish it. Polish it good, and try to make sure that it meets those standard manuscript formatting requirements (it helps more than someone who’s never tried to edit a magazine might realize).

Our rates have not changed; we still pay 0.01 per word with an additional 0.01 bonus on the first 2.5k words ($50 for 2.5k, $75 for 5k, $100 for 7.5K, etc).

We’ll be buying roughly 120K words of content for 2018.

New Anthologies

We don’t have anything to do with these directly, but they’re pretty exciting and feature some Cirsova contributors and our friends.

Misha Burnett is putting together a 21st Century Thrilling Adventure anthology (yes, I know the blog post has a different title; I’m going by the G+ group’s name). Previously, Misha Burnett pulled together the Eldritch Earth Geophysical Society and collaborated with Cirsova to release those stories in our most recent issue, so you can be sure that the awesome-potential for this new anthology is really high.

Hugo Awards Stuff
We just got our instructions on what we need to do to put together our Hugo Voter Packet, so we’re in the process of getting that assembled.

A few things I’ve noticed:

A Hugo nod only got us a negligible day-one spike in traffic; it pales in comparison to the time someone linked to us in Larry Correia’s blog comments.

Media really doesn’t seem that interested in the Hugos; other than sharing the standard press release, coverage has been “LOL, Stix Hiscock!” and “Hey, these Marvel comics that are supposedly not selling well got nominations, so they’re actually doing great, right?” The relatively low vote bar for a nomination isn’t the greatest indicator of sales numbers or profitability, lemme tell ya!

The biggest media outlets in the state we’re based in didn’t even pick up the press release.

Still, the Voter packet is a huge deal for us. I’d estimate our readership at somewhere between 150-200. Even if only a tiny fraction of the Worldcon membership gives us a look, that’s a chance to hugely expand our readership.

I don’t have any illusions about our chances and would not be surprised if we get nuked for no other reason than being on Vox Day’s list. We weren’t on the original Rabid Puppies list, which should be no surprise, since we really don’t publish the sort of stuff that’s in his wheelhouse, but Jeffro and some other folks put in a good word for us. However we ended up with a nomination, I’m just happy to be here.

If you want to support us in the Hugo Awards contest, you can do so by becoming a Worldcon member. I won’t make any appeal to try to convince folks who just aren’t interested in or don’t want to support Worldcon to do so just to vote for us, but we’re participating, because to change things, one has to participate.

If you want to support the magazine itself, the best ways to do so are buying copies (Amazon, Lulu) or advertising with us. If you’ve read the magazine, please leave reviews!

Reblogged this on Brink's Chaos Theory and commented:
Wishing P. Alexander and CIRSOVA lots of luck! If you’re at all interested in sci-fi or writing (or even reading!) takes a minute to read this post. Even as someone who’s been slowly working myself into the writing scene for two decades (wow, have I really??!), this is mostly new stuff to me. And if you can participate, we’d really appreciate your spreading the word and your vote!